


a long-held breath of discontent

by hilarions



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Bakery AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 19:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14408607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilarions/pseuds/hilarions
Summary: Link has been sighing for days now, imagining stupidly how it might feel to have the taste of lemon tart linger on his tongue.





	a long-held breath of discontent

Link sighed. Every day, for perhaps a week. And then two. And then, regrettably, three.

Sometimes he would realise. Most times he wouldn’t. He’d become aware of his breaths in the midst of a long, quiet exhale, all laced with morose reluctance. Those times he noticed he’d catch himself, close his eyes and shake his head in some disappointed reprimand. No, no. He didn’t have time for sighing. He didn’t have time for any kind of morose reluctance. He most certainly did not have time to think about what had him sighing.

So he made a conscious decision to stop. He’d do quite well at it, for a time. But through the methodical mindlessness of slicing bread, baking pies and icing cakes, he’d catch himself filling tarts with some bitter sort of desire slipping past his lips. It was absurd and ridiculous and, of all things, had him thinking about lemon curd. It was all too likely because of the tarts themselves.

Link often discovered, in those moments between releasing the sigh and only realising it was gone once it had ghosted past his lips, that he had an awful urge to indulge himself in tasting the sour-sweet tang of the batter. The one time he caved - unthinkingly - he immediately regretted it. He could already feel another budding deep in his chest.

It seemed he was afflicted with something chronic, and sighing was the worst of his symptoms.

Allen, behind the coffee grinder and steam wand, looked somewhat concerned. Link supposed he wasn’t the sort of person people tended to ask after, though, despite any concerns they might harbour. Allen was regularly concerned for him, for some reason or another, but tended to express that through fixing rather than talking. More often than sometimes would he stay back ten minutes, thirty, an hour after his shift to ease Link’s workload, wordlessly help beyond close where he wasn’t rostered.

Link doubted very highly that Allen would be of any help here and with that thought he let another sigh slip past his lips.

“Flat white,” came a modest demand for attention from the unmanned counter. Link looked over from his parfaits and wished he hadn’t. A slinking smile, all easy confidence, and eyes an absolutely absurd shade of gold-brown. “And a lemon tart.” Quite suddenly, he didn’t feel any desire at all to sigh. In fact, his breath seemed to be caught in his throat.

He hesitated a moment too long, and he knew if Allen weren’t in the middle of dripping an espresso he’d have taken the order out of Link’s hands. As it was, he didn’t have much of a choice but to wipe his hands on his apron and take to the register, eyes cast pointedly low.

“Seven dollars fifty,” Link muttered to the screen, logging the order and putting it through.

“Pardon?”

Link made the mistake of looking up, brows folded into a glare. “Seven dollars fifty,” he repeated, pointedly pushing the chip reader a further inch closer to him.

“That’s what I paid last time,” he said, and sounded awfully amused with Link’s scowl.

“It’s what you’ll pay every time,” Link reasoned, obtusely bland.

“Right,” he laughed, tapping his card to the screen, “right. Are you taking your break soon?” he asked.

“No,” Link said and slid the receipt across the counter, pinned the order to Allen’s slider and placed the tart in a small white box which he left on the pick-up counter without another word.

He went back to his parfaits, and his neck prickled when he heard Allen call out a flat white and lemon tart for _Tyki._

The moment he was gone, Link felt a sigh well up in his throat. He swallowed it down, and kept working.

It was twenty minutes later, under the certainty that he would have long since gone, that Link pulled his apron over his head, placed a shortcake into a box for himself, and slipped out the back of the bakery. The walk-through center he worked at was in the part of town where everyone dressed well and wore Rolexs or activewear and strode past busily with pure-bred spaniels and pomeranians on neat leather leashes. He rather liked it. He wished he lived there, really, but working in a high-end bakery was a world away from being a patron of one. He knew that, and Allen knew that, and all their Rolex-wearing, pomeranian-walking customers knew it too. Tyki, for reasons Link could only imagine were unsavory, didn’t seem much to mind. Which was why, after ordering a superfluously sweet coffee at the cafe across the way and sitting down with his shortcake to wait for it to arrive, a nervous chill froze his spine in place when he saw Tyki Mikk sitting at the table opposite his with a coffee by his elbow, paper folded in half in his hand, and glasses perched on his nose.

Link immediately - upon finding he could move - busied himself with opening the white cardboard box of his tart, setting out a napkin for it, and hoping desperately that Tyki wouldn’t notice him.

“Double white mocha for Howard?” the barista called, altogether obnoxiously loud.

Shoulders tight, eyes pointedly unwavering from the counter, Link stood, retrieved his coffee, and sat back down. He hazarded a somewhat nervous glance at Tyki.

Newspaper seemingly forgotten, Tyki was regarding him from the opposite table, chin resting on the heel of his palm, fingers framing his lips, cheek, eye. “It’s no good to eat by yourself,” he said, mildly reasonable, from across the walkway between them.

Link frowned. “I’m at work,” he reasoned, fingers curling around the warm base of his takeaway cup. Wondering, however childishly, if he should run.

“So am I,” Tyki reasoned in return, and cast a vaguely uninterested glance at the paper he’d been perusing.

“What do you _do?”_ Link couldn’t help but ask, and couldn’t help the way he seemed, in the subtlest of ways, to sneer his words.

“Look for misprints,” Tyki answered simply, eyes still on the paper in his hand. _The Daily Times,_ Link read on the folded-over top page. He couldn’t make out the date, what with him at his table and Tyki all the way over at that other one, but he hazarded it was tomorrow’s. “What do _you_ do?” Tyki countered, for some absolutely absurd reason. He _knew_ what Link did. He’d persisted at frequenting the bakery for almost four weeks.

“I bake,” Link answered regardless, frown furrowing deeper between his brows.

“Funny,” Tyki commented, blithe, glancing up at Link through his glasses. “I know a baker just like you. He makes fantastic lemon tarts.”

Link’s scowl was somewhat undercut by the pink he could feel colouring his cheeks. “I suppose you prepositioned him into hating you too, then,” he said, prim and curt, fingers curling tighter around his cup.

The faintest of frowns disturbed Tyki’s brow, gently lined with years of concentration. “Do you hate me?” he asked. It was strange, the way he said it. As though Link had told him it was raining and he hadn’t heard the drops clattering against the roof. Not particularly involved. Somehow politely curious.

Link found he didn’t quite have an answer. He pressed his lips together, tightened his jaw, and turned his scowl down to the table under the pretense of rearranging his cutlery.

“I don’t mean for you to _hate_ me, Howard,” Tyki said, and almost sounded surprised. _Would you look at that. It_ **_is_ ** _raining._ The way he said Link’s name sounded not unlike a reprimand. “It’s just that you blush so easily - especially when you’re infuriated.”

Lips parted, jaw loose, and cheeks red with affront and awful, _awful_ embarrassment, Link looked up and demanded, “I’m sorry?”

A smile quirked at the corner of Tyki’s lips, and he went back to his newspaper, chin still resting in his hand. “You haven’t got a very thick skin, have you,” he observed, indulgently amused, eyes dragging lazily over the page.

Link decided to clamp his jaw once more, and resolved to keep it that way.

“I suppose what I’m trying to say,” Tyki hummed to his paper, effortlessly unconcerned, “is that you’re very cute, and you make fantastic lemon tarts.”

Link glared at the salt and pepper shakers, pulled in a careful breath, and picked up his cutlery.

“I’d never take ‘no’ to mean ‘yes’, of course,” he continued regardless, unfolding the paper to turn to the second page, “but what I’d like to know is if you’d like me to sit across from you rather than at the _table_ across from you.”

“Why would I want that?” Link couldn’t help but snap, the soft crust of his shortcake crumbling under his knife onto the napkin.

“I have a feeling you know how to spell ‘restaurant’,” he reasoned very simply, squinting at something on the page. “I don’t, and I haven’t the faintest clue whether this idiot does either. I suppose the answer you’re looking for,” he finished, holding the paper out like a request, “is bragging rights.”

Link held his composure for all of ten seconds. “Restaurant?” he repeated dumbly.

“Bragging rights,” Tyki nodded emphatically, “over the _Times’_ Editor.”

“Can’t you just look it up?” Link asked.

“Nothing's stopping me,” Tyki admitted, but made no move to pick his phone up from the table and hand _bragging rights_ over to Google.

Link hesitated, swallowed down the lingering taste of lemon on his tongue, and caved with a quiet, silently relieved sigh. “R-E-S-T-A-U-R-A-N-T.”

Tyki sucked a scolding breath through his teeth, shook his head at the paper, and stood from his seat to move into the one opposite Link’s. “Wisely’s gonna get an earful,” he seemed to reprimand, settling in to circle the misspelled _resteraunt_ and write a correction beside it. “What idiot doesn’t know how to spell _restaurant?”_

Link arched a brow and brought his sugar-sweet coffee to his lips. What idiot thought  _bragging rights_ were a real thing.


End file.
